Westerman is bringing 90's Joni Mitchell vibes with 'CSI: Petralona', the first single from his upcoming album 'An Inbuilt Fault'.
London-born, Athens-based artist Westerman has annouced his long-awaited second album, An Inbuilt Fault, due on May 5th 2023 via Partisan Records. Alongside the announcement, Westerman shared the new single ‘CSI: Petralona’ co-produced by himself and James Krivchenia (Big Thief). The track follows previous single “Idol; RE-run‘. Through the process of writing his upcoming album, finding textures became a central concern for Westerman – he took programming and looping into his own hands, creating polyrhythmic grooves to lend urgency to his inner dialogue. In addition, Westerman’s vocals are featured rawer and drier in the mix than ever before, reinforced by bursts of rich three-or-four-part vocal harmonies.
"The lyrics were immediate. It's presented on the album as it was first written."
Westerman shares how ‘CSI: Petralona’ came together noting: “I had the riff for the song and left it lying around with a bunch of other bits and pieces. A friend told me that Tom Waits has this image of having a musical junk drawer of old parts that you haven’t found anything to do with. It came from there. I went to Greece for a month to scope out if I wanted to move here, and a friend encouraged me to write about this strange day I had there. The lyrics were immediate. It’s presented on the album as it was first written. It’s the most autobiographical song on the record.”
Check out the visualiser for ‘CSI: Petralona’:
An Inbuilt Fault encapsulates some of the most adventurous and unselfconscious songwriting of Westerman’s career with music that is heavier and more sonically daring than his previous releases. While first working solo through a period of isolation in Italy in 2020 and 2021, a chance meeting with Big Thief’s James Krivchenia at a show in London changed this. Westerman decided to take a leap of faith and collaborate with the drummer and an extended crew of Los Angeles associates to flesh out his new songs. The Italy demos became jump-off points for jams which, in imaginatively edited forms, pushed the songs into new affective realms; sometimes, the mood became more sinister, sometimes more triumphant. Throughout the album, Westerman abstracts his specific points of inspiration into invented scenes featuring multiple characters (sometimes distinguished with vocal effects or alternate vocal ranges) and allows his most broad-strokes universal sentiments to dominate the foreground. The result is Westerman’s own mini-epic about being in crisis, stitched together from torn song fragments and spontaneous moments of musical exorcism, which combine to tell a story that takes clearer shape with repeated listens.
The album news follows the announcement of his first North American tour in four years beginning this May with stops including Seattle, Chicago, New York, Washington, DC, Austin, and Los Angeles. Westerman played a UK tour last Autumn including a packed London show at Union Chapel and will have more UK live dates to be announced soon. He has also revealed the album artwork by the renowned New York via Portugal graphic designer and illustrator Bráulio Amado, with whom Westerman has had a long-standing creative relationship, working together on his previous debut album.
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